Juniper pulls ATM Jackpot talk from Black Hat

By Sean Kerner | June 30, 2009

From the 'Black Hat mythos grows' files

The Black Hat security conference is one that has a certain mystique surrounding it - which has been fuelled in recent years by controversial talks that get pulled. This year will be no different. A presentation on how to hack ATMs, titled, 'Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines' has been pulled from the 2009 event set for July.

The session was going to be delivered by Barnaby Jack, a Juniper Networks security researcher. Juniper (which is a vendor I cover in both the enterprise and service provider networking space) decided after getting some pressure from the at-risk ATM vendor to have Jack pull his talk.

Juniper however is still standing by Jack and his research.

"Juniper believes that Jack's research is important to be presented in a public forum in order to advance the state of security," Juniper said in a statement emailed to InternetNews.com. "However, the affected ATM vendor has expressed to us concern about publicly disclosing the research findings before its constituents were fully protected."

That doesn't mean we won't eventually get to hear Jack's talk -- it's just that it won't be disclosed at Black Hat this summer.